


In a Name

by Farvel



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Brasidas is a good friend, Character Study, Father-Son Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Gen Work, Historical Accuracy, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, and a troll, at least mostly, it's not explicit, just spartan society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-17 20:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16981227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Farvel/pseuds/Farvel
Summary: What is in a name?From the runt of their group to the student of the Wolf of Sparta, Stentor has come a long way(When he gives his name, his friend laughs. He continues laughing even when he punches him in the gut with enough force to make it a very winded laugh.)





	In a Name

**Author's Note:**

> I've not written in a fandom for a long time but AC punched me in the feelings and I somehow fell in love with this character. Also, it was real fun to write in this style and to throw in my headcanons and historical knowledge because the Spartan agoge is a very harsh concept.  
> No explicit stuff here but there is one short reference of a boy being hurt by having sex with an older male, just so that you know, it's the sentence right after the one ending with "...preferring them living nearer to their barracks." if you want to skip it.

When his mater dies, there is none left to care for him.  
(He can only vaguely remember his pater, the sliver of a smile here or the flash of grey eyes like his own there. Sometimes he thinks he only imagined them, false memories built on the words of his mater. Her warmth will, at least, stay with him.)  
So they send him to training, five years and smaller than all the others, for he would have said goodbye either way to his mater soon. Instead his new family consists of about twelve other boys and their paidómos (at least he thinks they were twelve in the beginning but hunger and harsh seasons soon see a change that). They are divided about him, his small stature and younger age making him much more fragile than the rest and they can see the grief marring his face.  
(Years later, when his shoulders span wide underneath his armor, weighted down by war and grief, they will remember the slip of a child with the brittleness in his eyes and how wrong they were about him. He is not fragile glass, he is steel, beaten, bend, maybe broken, but he forges his own fate. Small he may be still.)  
But they are one group now, one agélai, and they have to care for each other (no one else will). They soon realize that they can easily use him to steal much more easily, his tiny stature marking him as a much younger child, and so he learns to play roles, the child lost, the child waiting for family, the child with a rich family (the child that would have loved a family). But even he grows and soon he stops being the diversion and becomes a thief like the rest, stealing food with the other boys. The first time he is grabbed and thrown before the feet of his paidómos, it is him that punishes him. Only when the sun has already long set is he left in the dirt with a metallic taste on his tongue and a blackness creeping in. It is one of the older boys that comes then, a boy with kind eyes and kinder words, scrapes him off the ground and cares for him. He is the one that patches him up and bends his fingers back into their original shape.  
(His paidómos did not see a warrior in him, the runt of the litter, because he still remembers the newborn placed at the base of Mount Taygetos, left to die. And yet he had prevailed.)  
After that, it’s the older boy that takes him under his wing, teaches him when to steal and when to cut his losses. He learns to work together as a group with the others to get as much food as they can and which vendors and farmers to avoid because their punishments would be swift and brutal.  
(He doesn't learns his friends name then, too often they used other words for each other so that they could not be identified by their names alone, another defense as much as to remind him of his outsider status. The other were an agélai before him, he would have to earn his place and their names. No one has spoken his own in a long time and sometimes he thinks he made it up like the memories of a family long lost.)

  
Slowly but surely he grows, limbs flailing when they train and he often has to dance longer than all the others with his weapon, a wooden training sword. His friend laughs at him but steals him plants for healing when his bare feet won’t stop bleeding afterwards. The older boy is much more elegant, his moves precise, while he stumbles, the weight of the sword wrong in his small hands. But he dances with the rest of them, determined to show his abilities. It takes time and blood but they begin to show him more respect every day and one day the little runt in their minds has transformed into a determined boy willing to fight tooth and nail. They also realize his ability to strategize and make good use of it, pilfering abandoned places and daring to raid the dwellings of the heílotes. They get cocky. When they are attacked by defending heílotes, he grabs a broken trident. This time he dances perfectly and it’s only with great reluctance that he leaves his makeshift weapon behind. The next time they train, their paidómos hands him a spear instead of his typical sword, something like grudging respect in his eyes.  
Time flies by and he grows accustomed to the steady hunger and his feet stop bleeding running over jagged stones, the punishments begin to peter out and soon it has been months that anyone caught him stealing. He adapts. They all do.  
When the other boys begin their twelfth year after being born, things change. By now the people in charge of them seem to have forgotten that he is younger than all of the other boys in his agélai and he is treated like the rest of them. Whatever small comforts they had, they are taken away and only left with a red cloak. Together, they pull reed from the Eurotas River and build their beds in abandoned houses and caves. They begin looking for older warriors to mentor them and some boys leave, their mentors preferring them living nearer to their barracks. Sometimes a boy comes back from training limping, face pained, and another one brings him water to clean his torn entrance. It’s then that he admits to being scared to his friend, they all know that they are expected to ask for a mentor and that they are supposed to enter into a relationship with the one chosen, but still he frets. The older boy tries to assure him that not every coupling hurts and that it is not often that a student is left bleeding, but he leaves soon after, one of the oldest of their group. (“Brasidas”, he says, “and what shall I call you, little one?” which makes him scrunch his nose up because he is not as small anymore but his friend is practically a mountain towering over him and he knows that it is a lost cause to berate someone that has known him since he was the runt of their group. When he gives his name, his friend laughs. He continues laughing even when he punches him in the gut with enough force to make it a very winded laugh.) He knows that they are expected to ask an older citizen themselves so he begins to plan. He has grown from the little runt to the boy demanding respect from his peers and he will not fail this new stage in his training. Over the years, he has met many different warriors and so he knows which men to avoid but while he also knows who would treat him kindly, it is not something he wants from a mentor. His ambitions are too high for that. He had to fight his whole life, he does not plan to stop now.

  
Soon after, the Wolf of Sparta returns.

  
Nikolaos of Sparta is a well-respected man and an even more legendary warrior and so he knows that many would fight to become this man’s student. But he chooses none (and they can hear the whispers how his children died and his wife fled their country, how he lived all alone in his house). But he can be stubborn when he wants to be and the first time he sees the Wolf leading a training he knows that this is the man he will follow. There is something in the calmness of his words and the patience he shows the younger men that lure him in (and the brittleness so much like his own, but Nikolaos of Sparta looks somehow colourless, even wearing bright red. That is their difference, he seems to fade away even when loudly declaring his presence while the Wolf so easily announces his presence even when seemingly doing his best to blend into the background). At first he only looks on while the men train but soon he takes to following Nikolaos and learns his daily life. It…is plainly boring, the man has no family and what time he does not spend training he sits alone in his house or makes the trek to Mount Taygetos. Whatever he is looking for, he does not seem to find it and it is on one of those days that he decides to dare his first approach.  
It does not go well.  
Nikolaos of Sparta does not want to mentor him, does not want to train him and sends him away. He goes. The next day he is back and watches the men train, his wooden spear clutched tight in his hands. When the Wolf sees him, he sighs and tries to ignore him. He does not like being ignored. It becomes something akin to a game between them, Nikolaos trying to ignore the little boy dogging his every step and the boy doing his very best to stay underfoot. The day Nikolaos comes home to find it invaded by the, in difference to his peers, tiny child in his home doing his very best to nearly burn himself while baking bread, he sighs only and goes to pluck the boy from his wobbly perch over the open fire. They stare at each other, Nikolaos holding the boy by the neck like a mutt and the boy daringly staring back. Nikolaos can see his eyes watering where he tries to stop himself from blinking first. With a sigh, he hefts the boy onto a wooden bench and takes control over the food.  
It’s burnt and not really edible but the company, even if only an unruly child, is better than Nikolaos had in a long time. He stares at the boy stuffing his face even if the food is truly atrocious and realizes with a sinking feeling that he has grown fond of him. As if reading his thoughts, the boy looks up and their eyes meet. There is mischief in the greys and abruptly Nikolaos **knows** that this boy has him figured out, that this had been his plan all along. That smile of his just a bit too smugly. He snorts and the smile gets wider. Knowing mutt, the Wolf of Sparta thinks, but he can work with loyalty like that.  
(“What is your name, boy?” Nikolaos asks later, when his new student moved whatever he had into a corner of his house. The boy stares at him and blinks. Nikolaos blinks back.  
“Stentor, my name is Stentor”, he says at last and wrinkles his nose when his new mentor slaps a hand against his face and breaks into helpless laughter.  
“Of course it is, of course the boy who refuses to be ignored is called Stentor”, the man guffaws and looks much more lively than usual. Stentor frowns at him, adults are _weird_.)

(Brasidas laughs when he hears about the Wolf of Sparta taking on a student. He laughs even harder when, after a few years, Nikolaos officially adopts this student. He makes sure to gleefully remind his friend of their shared past when he calls him the Cub of Sparta. The training spear rammed into his side is truly worth Stentor’s sputtering and then his enraged shouting. Nikolaos sighs longsuffering and leaves his new son and his friend to their antics. At least the boy truly lives up to his name.)

**Author's Note:**

> Stentor is the name of a herald in the Illiad that, while losing a shouting contest against Hermes, was said to have a voice as powerful as the voices of fifty other men
> 
> I admit, I had to stop playing the game when Stentor told the misthios that he had been mentored by Nikolaos, i was wheezing because that means that Nikolaos most likely fucked him at some point and then adopted him. Lmao, I just had to throw this out, ignore me  
> also, the ages of the characters are weird in the wikia, for this here i imagined Stentor born around 451 bc which makes him younger than the misthios but older than deimos and Brasidas as around the misthios age or a bit older because he was remarked to be quite young for his military triumphs  
> there's is some Greek used but I hope it is understandable, there are just some things that do not translate well into a different language when talking about a certain concept (which is rich seeing that my Ancient Greek is really not good)
> 
> Spartan agoge:  
> Babies are judged by Elders and when they are not deemed healthy enough placed at the base of Mount Taygetos to either survive for a few days or die  
> Age 7 - 12 living in groups under an older citizen (the paidomos)  
> Around age 12 they are expected to ask an older warrior to mentor them and enter into an institutionalized relationship with them and get everything taken away besides a red cloak  
> There are more important age groups but this is the part of training that I focused on


End file.
